Image par emylo0
Regardless of the type of WordPress website you have, these six essential plugins should be installed:
1. Duplicate Page
Duplicating pages, posts, and custom posts should be a basic feature in WordPress, but since it’s not, I use the free Duplicate Page plugin. It’s particularly useful when you need to create a similar page or test changes before applying them to the published page.
Once you’ve installed the plugin, just head to “Posts,” find the post you want to duplicate, and click on “Duplicate This.” When you’re viewing a page or post while connected to the WordPress admin, you can also go to “Edit post” in the top WordPress menu and click on “Duplicate This as draft.” Easy peasy!
2. Redirection
The free Redirection plugin is also a must-have, in my opinion. I use it in three ways:
- To monitor changes to URLs, and automatically create redirections. No more manual updating of internal links when you change a page name – the plugin takes care of it by creating a 301 redirection. How convenient is that?
- To track 404 errors that visitors encounter. This helps identify any issues and allows you to create the necessary redirections on the go.
- To create short URLs for marketing purposes. Instead of sharing long URLs, you can create short and concise ones, like yourdomain.com/SummerEvents. This is especially useful for posters or social media posts. Additionally, this plugin can ignore all query parameters. This is important when sharing short URLs or redirections on social media, as some platforms add queries to the URLs you post. If your redirection plugin doesn’t offer this last feature, the short links you post on social media might end up broken. I know – it happened to me!
3. SEO Framework
The SEO Framework is a free plugin that helps optimize your site for search engines. It is known for its speed, efficiency, and lightweight design. With this plugin, you can easily configure settings such as title tags, description tags, homepage, social media integration, schema output, robots meta, webmaster integration, sitemap, and feed.
When viewing your list of posts or pages in the WordPress admin, the plugin provides colour-coded guidelines for optimal title and description length. It also indicates whether each page is indexed, followable, archivable, or it redirects to another URL.
When editing a page, you’ll find SEO settings at the bottom, including meta title, meta description, social media title, description, and image. Additionally, the visibility tab allows you to control the page’s visibility. I frequently use this tab on a city website to archive pages, meaning I them accessible for informational purposes but I remove them from search results when they’re no longer relevant.
Although all of this may seem overwhelming, the plugin offers good documentation to help you get started. For more information about SEO, you can also refer to Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO.
4. Enable Media Replace
With this plugin by ShortPixel, you can easily replace an existing media file in your WordPress Media Library with a new file of the same format. This eliminates the need to delete or rename media files, or to modify references to the replaced file in your WordPress posts or pages. It’s especially handy for updating images or documents without changing embedded links.
5. A caching plugin: WP Rocket or W3 Total Cache
Caching is a process that stores copies of files, such as HTML pages, images, and web objects. Adding a caching plugin to your website is important for optimizing performance. It reduces server load and speeds up web page access by serving stored copies instead of processing every visit. The WP Rocket plugin, available for a fee of 59 USD per year, is widely regarded as the top caching plugin in the market. If you prefer a free caching plugin, W3 Total Cache is an excellent choice, and the one I currently use.
6. GenerateBlocks or GenerateBlocks Pro
With the arrival of the block-based WordPress editor Gutenberg in 2018, there came a lot of new block libraries, many of which weren’t particularly lightweight or user friendly. Then, the makers of GeneratePress created the GenerateBlocks and GenerateBlocksPro plugins.
GenerateBlocks provides six blocks—Container, Grid, Headline, Button, Image, and Query Loop—for which you can control the typography, spacing, and colours, as well as add backgrounds and shapes (when applicable). The Pro version gives you Tabs, Accordions, Effects, Advanced Backgrounds, Container Links, Global Styles, an Asset Library and a Pattern Library. Since these two plugins were developed by the same lightweight and accessibility-focused team as the one that gave us GeneratePress, you know they will be up to standard.
What, no backup or security plugin?
You may have noticed that I didn’t include a security or backup plugin in my list. The reason for this is that if your website is hosted by Cloudways or WPX, among others, you already have access to features like daily backups, on-demand backups, one-click restores, and robust security measures. These server-side solutions offer the advantage of not significantly impacting your site’s performance compared to using plugins.
That said, if you want an extra layer of security, you could use All In One WP Security. This security solution is user friendly and easily set up, making it suitable even for beginners.
As for backups, if your hosting provider already offers daily backups with easy restore options, the additional backups provided by a plugin would come in handy only if your existing backups were compromised or corrupted for any reason. While this is unlikely with a reliable host, it did happen to me once on a cheaper host. If you want to be on the safe side, you could consider adding daily and incremental remote backups. Two options for this are ManageWP’s backup service (2 USD per month) and UpdraftPlus Premium (70 USD per year). Both services also provide free backup solutions for those who don’t frequently update their sites or who already have a backup system in place.
Your turn
Which plugins do you typically install on all your websites?
